Eric Schnoebelen was a long time supporter of SDF and decided to expand his home built computer room to accommodate not just the clients of Telereality Associates but also SDF. He experimented with a multi-homed T1 setup with 3 different providers routing both SDF’s and CIRR’s Class C IPv4 networks. The main systems used in this setup were DEC Alpha DS10Ls of which Eric had an endless stack. They were cheap, fast and mostly reliable with a common failure being the CPU fan. It was easier to just swap disks with a spare and replace the fan later.
During this time all of the SDF hosts were Alphas. Alpha Processor Incorporated was a group of former DEC employees after the Compaq acquisition of DEC that built a “Super Computing” class dual processor 1U server using 21264 CPUs at 833MHz. They were designed to run Linux and in fact, have Linux in ROM which can be used for failure recovery, but also run NetBSD quite well. Though, in those days SMP wasn’t very reliable and usually one processor would cause a deadlock making it difficult to debug and not ready for production.
Eric had a stash of Alphas in Plano, but these are the ones that were retired in Seattle. They were going to be recycled, but not quite yet.